Erich Berger is an artist, curator and cultural worker based in Helsinki/Finland. He directs the Finnish Society of Bioart creating interdisciplinary encounters between art and science. His artistic interests lie in processes and feedback structures, which he investigates through installations, situations, performances and interfaces. Throughout his artistic practice he has explored the materiality of information and information and technology as artistic material. His current interest in issues of deep time and hybrid ecology led him to work with geological processes, radiogenic phenomena and their socio-political implications in the here and now. His latest work, the INHERITANCE project (with Mari Keto), asks: What do we leave behind, what will the future inherit from us?http://inheritance-project.net/http://randomseed.org

We are happy and excited to announce that artist Trine Mee Sook will be doing the performance ‘selections from Vampire Talk I-III’ at the Monster Network event ‘Strange Blood?’ on 21 October at LitteraturHaus in Copenhagen at 8pm.

The text based performance trilogy, Vampire Talk, combines semi-biographical experience with notions of racial representation and otherness in relation to vampirism and trans-national adoption. Suggesting that vampires and trans-national adoptees share not only blood-related interests but also certain similarities in relation to identity building, sex, family, and colonial discourse.

The Strange Blood? event now has its own Facebook site and, because we’re cool kids, a hashtag: #StrangeBlood

We hope to see you in Copenhagen 21 October!

To catch up on the event, here’s what it’s about:

Increasing migration, border control and use of biotechnologies for reproductive assistance make up the structural backdrop for intense debates about personhood, citizenship and national belonging in the Nordic countries.

Strange Blood? asks: What is at stake in these debates about personhood and subjectivity, citizenship and kinship? How are these debates surfacing in the Nordic countries, especially through narratives of blood and strangeness? Are there differences between the Nordic countries? What do artists and academics bring to these debates?

The Monster Network invites you to a roundtable conversation with scholars and artists to discuss the above questions regarding Nordic belonging and its relation to the strange and the other.

We’ve been a little quiet the past few months but only because we’ve been hard at work with the upcoming Monster Network special issue of Somatechnics as well as applying for funding for all our many plans for the Monster Network. We’ve now received some money from Nordisk Kulturfond and will be spending it on a Halloween event in Copenhagen on the 21st of October, so save the date! We’ll return with more info soon, but for now, here’s a few words on the event:

Increasing migration, border control and use of biotechnologies [for reproductive assistance] make up the structural backdrop for intense debates about personhood, citizenship and national belonging in the Nordic countries.

Strange Blood? asks:What is at stake in these debates about personhood and subjectivity, citizenship and kinship? How are these debates surfacing in the Nordic countries, especially through narratives of blood and strangeness? Are there differences between the Nordic countries? What do artists and academics bring to these debates?

The Monster Network invites you to a roundtable conversation with scholars and artists to discuss the above questions regarding Nordic belonging and its relation to the strange and the other.